Normally the eye is some kind of upgrade or super sense. It may have a superzoom, infrared or perhaps digitised vision. This is quite common with the Cyborg hero whose powers are his cybernetic upgrades.

Sometimes the eye is very visually distinct. Bizarre irises or unusual pupils mark the individual. Working on the principle of the eyes being the window to the soul, these Technicolor Eyes can be a small but direct method of demonstrating the fact that an otherwise normal-looking individual is at least partially cybernetic. In the case of prosthetic eyes they also work as a scar signifier. Since the eyes are taken as so much more personal they can be a much smaller effect for greater emotional impact.

In Ghost in the Shell (all versions) one of the main characters, Batou, has very obvious artificial eyes. In Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex they are referred to as "ranger eyes," after the eyes used by the ranger unit he belonged to when he was in the military. Not much is revealed of their capabilities.

They are shown to include night vision, a powerful zoom, limited ability to detect thermoptic camouflage and in the final episode of 2nd Gig a visual Trust Password when a corrupt official is silly enough to send Rangers after a former Ranger.

In Stand Alone Complex, Borma has a similar pair of eyes, except they are red. Nothing known about their capabilities. Saito's left eye is his cybernetic "Hawkeye", which has a super powerful scoping ability and he can access satellites to zoom in on his targets to help with his sniping. When not used, remains closed, looking akin to an eye patch.

In the Stand Alone Complex version these are implied to be fairly common, though with less conspicuous versions than Batou and Borma. The Major (being a full body cyborg) has them, as does the minister in the very first episode.

Cowboy Bebop star Spike Spiegel has a false eye. It functions practically identically to a natural eye, with no nifty technological tricks. The only sign of its falseness is the fact that it's a slightly different shade of brown than his real eye.

In Cyborg 009, 003's Super Senses come from ehr being turned into a Cyborg. Her electronic eyes are shown in quite the detail in the 2012 movie.

Bandou of Elfen Lied gets these after Lucy destroys his original eyes. Notably, they're actually a little less functional than a normal human eye (they tint everything yellow and make things a bit blurry), but Bandou's not going to complain when the alternative was blindness.

Comicbooks

Judge Dredd has Bionic Eyes, given to him during the "City of the Damned" story arc, after his real ones were ripped out of their sockets by a zombie version of himself from the future. Dredd notes that the new eyes give him 20:20 night vision, enhanced clarity over distance, and a 50% reduction in blinking time. He praises the efficiency of his new eyes after he gets them, and his one regret is that he never got them sooner. Truth be told though, you'll probably be hard-pressed to ever find another Dredd story where any of these improved eye functions become useful to him in a situation. However, in the Two Thousand AD story The Dead Man, one of the earliest tip-offs to the reader revealing that the titular disfigured character is actually Dredd is the fact that his eyes "don't look natural". It also crops up in another story, where a group of perps use an EMP device. Unsurprisingly, Dredd is Blind Without 'Em.

Mr. Marsh of No Hero has computers in his head that's revealed by glowing eyes.

Police captain Wiggins in Grendel: Devil's Legacy. We never see how this works but the eye can be attuned to a person's physiology to function as a lie detector (much the same way as a real lie detector works but in this case, he's probably seeing somewhat like what Geordi Laforge might see through his visor). Quite useful in questioning suspects. Although, apparently he often prefers to rely on his intelligence and intuition rather than just his built in lie detector. He's probably aware that any good liar can beat a lie detector.

X-Men members Psylocke had losts her original eyes to the Slaymaster and had them replaced with bionic ones by Sprial that instantly adjusted to light and broadcasted everything to Mojoworld. She lost them (and has them replaced with normal eyes) and Kwannon gained them when they had their body swap.

Robocop says his eyes are "the best money can buy"; they are somehow superior to human vision, despite having visibly poor screen-resolution Robo Cam. The built-in HUD featuring target identification, police database interface, system status readouts, and recording capability is a considerable upgrade over the original human eyes. (it's not in his faceplate: the readouts persist even after he's taken it off)

In Repo! The Genetic Opera Blind Mag, born blind but given the ability to see by GeneCo at the price of having to sing for the GeneCo Opera. Eventually she is marked for repossession, but before it can happen she removes the eyes herself at the end of her final performance for Gene Co. She is of course, killed for her defiance.

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation films after Generations, Geordi LaForge replaced his VISOR with streamlined ocular implants. LeVar Burton did not like wearing the VISOR prop. From what we see in First Contact, the implants are far superior to the VISOR, as he is actually able to see people in normal colors, as opposed to rainbow shapes. It is unknown if he can still tell when people are lying. Given that during the TV series Geordi specifically declined ocular implants because they'd give him inferior vision to his VISOR, most likely the ones developed by the time of First Contact could see everything his VISOR could and more.

In Cube Zero, the villains's leader Jax lost one of his eyes due a mechanical mishap and had it replaced with a robotic one. It's only a Red Right Hand however and he never uses it for superhuman feats.

Common in the Revelation Space Series by Alastair Reynolds. The Ultranauts (crews of the starships) frequently adopt these, with their quality varying greatly. Dan Sylveste has artificial eyes which were locally made on a planet with little advanced technology, so his vision is terrible, like a public CCTV feed. Captain John Brannigan has red, multifaceted cameras where his eyes should be, though by that point he looks more machine than a man.

On the cover of the book Extras, the fourth book of the Uglies trilogy; the characters have "eyescreens," which is like permanent internet interface embedded in the eye that can be shut off at will.

The Dune universe has "Tleilaxu eyes": metal eyes that the Bene Tleilax claimed improved on the originals. The Duncan Idaho ghola Hayt was given them by his Tleilaxu creators. They were sometime bought to replace the eyes lost due to attacks by stone burners (indeed, when a stone burner goes off in Dune Messiah, someone comments, "The Tleilaxu will sell many eyes here"). Some Fremen believed that they enslaved their user.

One character in the Time Wars books loses an eye and gets a bionic replacement.

In Speaker for the Dead, Olhado lost his sight when he was young. Technology was advanced enough to replace his eyes with metal ones, which allowed him to videotape everything he saw and play it back in slow motion. However, he only used one functional replacement; he gave up binocular vision to have one of the eyes be a jack that he could use to upload the video of his father's abuse of his siblings.

Olhado, by the way, is supposed to be a nickname for "The Guy With The Eyes"; his actual name is Lauro Sulémão Ribeira von Hesse.

Honor Harrington gets one after the second book in the series. Get's nifty features like a zoom function and night vision but because the input doesn't quite match the remaining organic eye there's always a sense of something off. She ponders if having the other eye replaced would change that but isn't interested experimenting to find out. It does help her out during the duel with Denver Summervale, as she's able to zoom in on his face and watch for twitches.

In Quantum Gravity, Lila Black, Cyborg, has had her eyes replaced along with many other body parts. They are perfect mirrors because of this, which pushes her into the Uncanny Valley for some characters.

Though it functions on magic instead of cybernetics, Mad-Eye Moody's prosthetic eye in Harry Potter looks weird and has enhanced capabilities, like being able to spin in its socket and look in any direction, even behind him.

Cyber eyes are a pretty common implant in William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy, both for correcting bad vision and for vanity, Simstim stars almost always have them.

In The Red Vixen Adventures Lady Sallivera Darktail's right eye is prosthetic thanks to her ex-husband's abuse, she can make it look like a natural eye of any color but halfway through "Captive" she turns off the camouflage, so it looks like a black camera lens, to signify that she's no longer going to act like it didn't happen.

Live-Action TV

The "Bionic Eye" was first introduced in The Six Million Dollar Man. Not only could Steve Austin see perfectly with it, but it had 20X telescopic capability, could zoom in at will, had infra-red and night-vision capability, and was coordinated with his bionic arm to give him pin-point hand-eye coordination and accuracy, even making him an unbeatable tennis-player.

The Bionic Woman also had a bionic ear, which allowed her to hear voices from a full mile away.

In the TV movie The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman, Steve Austin's long lost son also gets a bionic eye. This eye doesn't have a zoom lens or infrared vision; instead, it has a laser.

The Borg in Star Trek are also mentioned to have ocular implants. Not a stretch, considering that most of them have some kind of cybernetic hardware covering (or replacing) one eye (or, occasionally, both). Seven of Nine's eyes look normal, but she retains the ability to see things normal humans can't.

Geordi La Forge usually has a visor, but future or alternate versions of him have high-tech prosthetic eyes; sometimes brown like the actor, sometimes not. The 'prime' Geordi finally gets 'em in First Contact (see Film.)

In Babylon 5 G'Kar gets a replacement eye for the one he lost during his captivity on Centauri Prime. Unfortunately, the only iris color that was in stock was blue, which is completely mismatched with the deep red color of his remaining eye.

The narrator of Jonathan Coulton's "The Future Soon" imagines meeting the girl he has a crush on in the future: "I'll see her standing by the monorail / She'll look the same except for bionic eyes / She lost the real ones in the Robot Wars..."

Tabletop Games

Common in the Shadowrun game 'verse. To the point where there are several brands, with Zeiss being the state of the art for cyber-eyes.

Among the many cybernetic implants the Imperium uses in Warhammer 40,000 "augmetic optics" are quite common. Gaunt's Ghosts features an electronic-eyed soldier who's a valuable reconnaissance asset as his range of vision extends across the electromagnetic spectrum.

Ocular augments in the Imperium can range from the comparitively cheap (yet still far beyond anything available yet in Real Life) kind mentioned above to implants that are nearly indistinguishable at first glance from natural eyes.

The Terminator ride at Universal Studios has a fake ad for cybernetic enhancements which shows a basketball player with artificial eyes that aid in his targeting. He sinks the perfect shot. And then his eyes glow red...

The Illusive Man's eyes are notable for being obviously artificial. The tie-in comic, Mass Effect: Evolution, reveals where he got them: a Reaper artifact on Shanxi. Notably, only one character ever mentions the Illusive Man's unusual eyes: Joker, in an off-hand remark about TIM's "freaky eyes" in Mass Effect 3.

The protagonist, Commander Shepard, is also mentioned as having implants to aid with targeting and so forth (along with various other body modifications). Kick the Dog enough and they glitch out and become a case of Red Eyes, Take Warning.

Zaeed Massani is a more subdued example—he has a cybernetic prosthetic eye to replace the one he (probably) lost when he was shot in the head. Said prosthesis is grey, while his real eye is green.

The Deus Ex series features these. One of the characters lampshades the fact that JC wears his glasses everywhere, and he responds by saying "My vision is augmented." Apart from a retina implant which allows seeing in dark areas, you can find an augmentation which allows you to see in infrared, and even through walls.

Actually, it isn't. In Mega Man 8, Robot Master eyes are shown to work similarly, although due to the vastly inferior animation it appears more as the eyes being a blank white until the rest fades in. The comics do this too, with inactive robots having blank eyes, and the eyes of forcibly shut down robots tend to glitch and display weirdly before going blank.

Garrett, from Thief, has a prominent Steampunkprosthetic eye from the second game onwards. It allows him to zoom in, as well as see through a special remote camera that can be tossed around corners. In one cutscene, it is shown that the eye apparently requires regular removal and maintenance, at least refilling with some fluid.

In Starcraft, ghosts can get an upgrade called "Ocular Implants," increasing their sight radius. It is actually quite useful as it allows the ghost to call in nuke strikes from outside the blast radius.

An NPC in Knights of the Old Republic, Gadon Thek, apparently has a pair of these, although they don't look too different from normal eyes. You can even ask him about his "freaky eyes".

Peacock, from Skullgirls, possesses an unusual version of these. Her eyes (on her face) are cartoony-looking Black Bead Eyes, but in reality just empty sockets. Instead, she has three large artificial eyes attached to each of her mechanical arms. She takes this further with the ability to summon an indefinite amount of these eyes; they are all free-floating and she can see out of every single one, giving her a massive field of vision. On top of that, they can all shoot lasers.

The Engineer of Team Fortress 2 can equip an accessory called "The Googly Gazer," which has alternate styles to make it look like either a regular Glass Eye or an electronic one. He also has Special Eyes, which look like glowing goggles with expressive metal eyelids.

Ads for these can be found in the first few levels of Perfect Dark Zero - and, as it turns out, Killian has them.

Dr. N. Gin of the Crash Bandicoot series has a mechanical eye as part of the life support system in his head crafted from a still-live rocket.

Rhys, one of the two protagonists of Tales from the Borderlands, has an Echo implant in his left eye, distinguishable from his natural brown by its bright blue colour. It allows him to scan objects and people to find out more information about them, and glows when he does so. In the present time his implant is yellow.

Webcomics

Kimiko in Dresden Codak acquired one of these after the Hob storyline.

Matrix, Enzo's adult form in Reboot season 3, after he lost an eye to an opponent in a fighting game, replaces it with a gold optic with a stylized M. When he gets angry, it rolls and the M on the other side glows red.

Unfortunately, these optic nerve/visual cortex devices currently have far lower resolution than even the cheapest digital camera, and are generally limited to producing "white" or "black" (on or off) pixels. It's better than being blind, but it produces nowhere near the detail of normal vision. Yet.

In 2005, Tanya Marie Vlach has lost her left eye in a car accident. Now she is collecting funds to help her build an HD-equipped prosthetic eye capable of augmented reality. Apparently, it will shoot in a 720p resolution. However, it will not send the data to a nerve of some sort. Instead, the video will be transmitted to a mobile device. Vlach wants the eye to take photos from blinks.

Rob Spence, "the Eyeborg," has something like this. He lost one of his eyes in a shooting accident as a teenager, and eventually had a prosthetic eye installed that matches the motion of his existing eye and transmits the video to a handheld receiver. It's not HD and it doesn't have Augmented Reality capabilities yet, but the technology is a proven element.

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy